The Last Spike

Welcome to the end

What’s more important, the act or the remembering of the act, the writing or the sharing of the writing? It seems that I’m excited by a swallow taking up company with me not because of the small moment of grace it carries but because I’ll be able to write about the bird and its gift.

This is my second to last night in Dawson and the last night I’ll have to myself. Tomorrow there’s a reception at The Odd Gallery followed by some sort of social activity. Booze will be involved and maybe a campfire, and people. The folk I’ve met here are genuine and gregarious and I’m lucky to have joined this community assembled from a widely cast net. Some hail from my neighbourhood in Toronto, others from Germany, or are itinerant, having arrived here from Iceland. Others found there way here from Montreal and Salt Spring Island. I am lucky to have met them but guilty of not knowing them as well as I could. But tonight is mine and is my last chance to sit up late and type over a cup of Earl Grey with the Midnight Sun straddling the rooftop to my west.

Earlier I took my bike out for a slightly muddy ride around town. There’d been heavy rain all day and I was grateful for the lack of distraction that sunshine might have caused. This evening though, the clouds broke and the sun shone and so I pedaled (and manualed) my way down to the jetty where the sternwheeler and catamaran dock. Sitting on the dock, hanging my feet over with just the rubber of my soles catching the brown water, I took in a last chance to feel the river’s mass and the midnight’s quiet. This was also a last chance to watch the Swallows feed from the river and I was more careful in watching their feeding. The pair seemed to be marionettes when they dropped to the water, as if their strings had gone loose and were then jerked up. Thankful for the show and the sound of the ferry echoing off the west bank, I eventually made my way back home.

It had been several days since reading from The Patrick Lane memoir that has provided me with much of my inspiration and context over this last month. I was feeling its absence and so when I returned to MacCaulay House, I sat on the step reading about Lane’s time as a medic at a sawmill in Avola, BC. The life of a mill worker and the regular injuries Lane attended to were often grisly and I was reminded of a serious car crash my friends attended to just outside of that lumber town.

This night has caught me, not surprisingly, in a mood of reminiscence. Soon I’ll be back in my present, where my daily rituals are held dear but often remind me of where I am rather than where I have been. There are exceptions of course. Whenever I eat a date (or even the occasional date square) I think of leaving Kelowna and how Ed, who worked at The Bean Scene (and later did tours in Afghanistan), presented me a paper bag with a corner piece as his parting gesture. Ed knew I loved the corners because it isn’t the dates, but the crumble with its buttery density that matters. Woodchips on the lawns of manicured Portuguese yards take me quickly to the woodchip verge of 870 Tataryn and the stupidity of 10 recently released soldiers defiling a neighbourhood that deserved better. And, to my first mountainbike.

As I write these memories out I think about the importance of connecting the island of my present in Toronto with these places of my past. In its scale and temperament, Toronto is unlike any of my previous worlds, but there are small, wonderous moments that do connect. The loamy earth on the west end of High Park has the same damp, sponginess as the training areas north of Victoria, just as running along the shore of Lake Ontario has the same smell of decaying plant life that evokes hung-over weekend runs with Bernie and Steve along Esquimalt’s boardwalk. My writing life began in Kelowna and it is in Toronto, from Shannon’s commitment to small, sad books that I regained the enthusiasm to put words and pictures to page.

A swallow joined me as I read from Lane’s book. Sitting quietly on the power line above my head, I wondered whether I was happier because it had joined me in my silence or because it seemed to be offering a perfect bookend to what I wanted to write about as Wednesday turns into Thursday and my last full day in Dawson begins.

Mastodon burial ground

Photos of the Paddle wheeler graveyard:

Mastodons

Downriver there’s a ferry graveyard. Just the name “ferry graveyard” is enough to get me excited. Elephants washed onto the beachhead from some unknown roaming ground.

* * *

While the village of Montrose had the equivalent population of Dawson it had only 2 stores: Roger and Barb’s Gas & Convenience and Dixie Lee Fried Chicken. A pretty static village there was little construction around town but the odd house did go up, especially in the newer, eastern end; employees of Cominco getting out of Trail’s barren slopes and moving up the more verdant mountainside for a more rural experience.

During the warm months I’d seek out newly framed houses, skeletons of dreams yet to be undone by the slow shuttering of the valley’s economy. Crossing the dry moat between lot and foundation on a springy two by ten, picking my way across the joists and plywood floors, climbing stairs that ascended, seemingly free of supports, to the second and third floor vistas. Leaping from the spaces yet to become windows down onto dirt piled around the foundation, these explorations were also an opportunity to scavenge. Workers often left loot behind and while the booty might be as little as a couple of empty pop cans those could be traded for their deposit and then traded again for 5 cent candies (2 Kraft Caramel squares for a nickel), occasionally the find was more impressive: a ball of twine, blanks from a nail gun or can of spray paint and sometimes actual tools. Claw hammers, robertson screwdrivers or a plumb line would be gathered up and brought home, hidden away and never used lest Dad see them and ask their origin.

Shannon recently asked me if I had a favourite memory from my childhood and to that question there’s no hesitation. Snowbanks were in full melting retreat as I pedaled back from Roger’s with a cluster of caramel squares in my windbreaker and a can of coke in one hand. I was riding a ten-speed, cruising along with the afternoon sun shining down, melting the snow and warming my forearms. The Coke was just opened and super-fizzy as I no-handed, feeling the sun on my flesh and the heat absorbed into my clothes. As much as that scenario sounds like a fake-indie commercial the truth is, I remember it with the clarity of happiness and temporary emancipation. Maybe it’s emancipation that gives me such joy. Letting go, reveling in my occasional luck at something, inexplicably, working out beyond all expectation. Not crashing on a hairy descent, enjoying a leisurely Americano on a park bench in the middle of the day, sprawled out in bed, telling stories and tracing a finger along a hip.

Arriving at the collapsing carcass of the Paddle wheeler I started rooting my way into the structure and those blissful clambers of half-built houses in Montrose came bubbling back. The smell of pine on a sunny day still gives that fleeting thrill of freedom and while this skeleton had no such smell – was a thing from an unknown past – it was also an echo of the future from my own youth. Like a suburban house caught in the gravitational pull of an event horizon, the paddle wheeler was held in a moment drawn out over decades. Slow collapse, splayed-out timbers like ribs, expanding village collapsing village, a kid and a ten-speed, this dialectic of possibility and entropy and, with each carefully placed step, the giddy rush of floating atop this mastodon.

Sound report: June 22

This evening I was supposed to go Peggy’s to watch Brecken and Jeramy do some slaying at Trivia Night, but right out my door it seemed like a night for something more contemplative. With the sun lighting up the town and heavy brooding clouds threatening to the South East, Trivia Night and tonic water seemed the lesser option. Approaching Peggy's and hearing a question about personal income tax, I peeked in but seeing the joint full, took the opportunity to wheel a quick 45 degrees and amble down to the riverbank.

By the time I found a log end to squat on, the evening light had turned grey-blue from the towering clouds traveling north up the valley. With three days left I’m feeling the pressure to catalogue those things I can’t take with me. Accordingly, here’s my list of sounds from the Confluence of The Klondike and Yukon Rivers at 2245 on June 22.

• The Shallows of the confluence downriver
• Waves lapping on the pebbles
• That previously mentioned songbird
• A squawking gull harassing a Bald Eagle (a coup to watch)
• The distant talk of four teenagers upriver
• An ATV on the edge of town
• The ferry, just barely audible

This is a pretty ideal ratio on the down side of the levee. The town, out of view is almost out of mind. The human noises are tertiary at best and the river’s life takes over. The clouds maintain their quiet drama while the green of the Klondike slices sharply into the muddiness of The Yukon.

Old haunts for new birds

“I did mange to meet the ghost from the upstairs closet (large bedroom), followed me around for a whole day.” So wrote David Hoffos in the Macaulay House residency journal that I've been perusing this afternoon.

Outside my bedroom window (I'm not in the large, haunted bedroom) there’s a songbird who has been my bedtime companion over the last weeks. If I was more of a birder I’d be able to list its name, and while I love painting birds I’m lazy with my ornithology so I haven’t come to any sort of answer. Laying in bed at 2am his repetitive call is a comforting cadence and a pleasure to nod off to.

With light peeking through the dark plastic blind, the six note refrain also begins to sound like the slow pendulum rhythm of a rusty swing set. For some reason it sits a little spookily with me but that’s because I watched too many horror films as a teenager and people keep asking me if I’ve met the McCauley House ghost. In this gold rush town myths die hard and while I haven’t met the ghost I have a songbird offering me lullabies. If asked, that seems worthy of some small legend.

And the clouds parted

There is, I was told before coming here, a local tradition of heading up to the top of Dome Mountain on solstice to watch the sun not set. Over dinner the night before Michael informed me that much of the population of the event consisted of Quebecois kids with bongos and quilted cords.

During my 6 years in Kelowna a few things were irrevocably tainted for me: Rollerblades, Spuds McKenzie work-out pants and Bongos. With this caution over local bongo density I was a little reluctant to head up The Dome especially as the day was thoroughly clouded over and intermittently rainy. As with all things celebratory in Dawson, solstice means drinks, so assembling with a cluster of KIAC related folk we sat, sipped and pondered the likelihood of heading up.

After working our way through rounds of vodka-sodas, pints of Yukon Gold, low-grade red wine, G&Ts, Jameson's and Warsteiner shandies we wandered onto the street straight around 1am and into view of the solstice rainbow. After spending a good chunk of my time here in something akin to a bunker mentality, pondering the land and isolation, it was (not ironic but) affirming to stumble upon a Sanford Gifford painting in the middle of a muddy street with a small group of very nice folk.

From this point forward the skies continued to offer truly melodramatic displays of transcendental possibilities. Pretty awesome down in town these moments of radiance would have been something to behold for the top of the mountain. Unfortunately, the chorus of Bongos would have most-likely altered the frequency of the light waves emanating down from the far north and likely ruined the display.

More dogs

Below: Crodmo of the North's drinking buddy followed by a self-portrait from when I was feeling pretty rough.

wildlife art

After numerous Warsteiners in numerous other bars I thought it time to make a return to The Pit and see if it might offer more options for the teetotaler. It also seemed like time to part ways with the Hi-def quietude of The Downtown Hotel in favour of the effulgent drunks.

Sheepishly, I asked the bartender what non-alcoholic options they might have. Having a fake beer in The Pit seems like going to a strip club because they have good chicken wings. Surprisingly, not only was there no Warsteiner, there were several options ranging from soft cider and Labatt Nordic to something looking way too similar to Warsteiner. I took the Nordic and sat down to watch Brazil vs. Côte d'Ivoire.

This, however, is just the back drop to an ongoing little quest of mine. While The Pit on a sunny Sunday reinforces my belief that early afternoon is the best time for a tipple (even if it’s a point five Labatt) I was here looking for wildlife. Like a German tourist Grizzly spotting up on The Dempster, I was on the spy for Crodmo of The North.

This aging drunk has an uncanny resemblance to what I believe South Eastern Crodmo might look like after a few decades of hard livin’. Just add age, bad teeth, a ponytail as well as a hockey jersey and a chipper demeanour and you have time travel version of my friend.

While everyone, myself included was glued to the game I snuck a couple of photos of the man in question and spent the afternoon drawing him. Here he is.

Sitting with a fern on a park bench

[Naval gazing is directly ahead. Consider yourself warned.]

I

I was back riding on the Dome trails today, slogging my way up the roughly paved Dome rd. with my helmet attached to my backpack so as to keep the sweatiness down. Soon though I was helmeted, booting down the dry, rocky south-face singletrack and, unlike my ride down the west slope, this time able to pick up some speed on the more reasonable downward grade.

The first time I rode these trails I had written about wishing my cycling friends could ride them with me. I also wrote that I didn’t miss their cycling companionship and was happy to share the loose, rocky descents with no one. Trail riding is a singular act even when in a group. Focus is key and it is the points in between that are social. So while a post-ride beer or americano is small treasure, the act itself remains suspended and insulated.

Also though these physical pursuits have become my means of allowing the world to lessen its volume, of gaining control through the physical act of controlling the ground moving under my wheels

Since arriving my world has turned on its ear. My working practice is moving along swimmingly and the people I meet are, almost without exception, genuine and welcoming but it’s gotten to the point where I am counting down the days until I fly.

I have been productive, prodigious and a diligent worker but have also asked myself some tough questions about the middle distance. All these qualities are welcomed. My practice as an artist often involves questioning the idea of knowledge gained through tribulation so I’d be hypocritical to not see some positives in my situation. Still, given the option of casually sauntering through my days I might say “Yes please”. As it stands, it is my running and riding, the roots, regulated breathing, drop-offs and burning thighs that allow me to garner my focus and lift myself up.

II

During the many years that Patrick Lane was lost to the wilderness of addictions he found himself (in retrospect) cutting off those who were attempting to become close. Travelling BC’s back-country he met many loners, some lost like he, others at peace with their chosen place, some bitter and raging, others placid and beatific. Recalling one such meeting, Lane talks about Thoreau and one possible outcome of seclusion. He writes,

“He was a solitary man, but there was nothing about him that spoke to me of loneliness, anger or despair. Like Thoreau, he had three chairs in his house, “one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” From what I saw that day and on the subsequent days I visited him over those years, the old man’s third chair was never occupied.”

This is my dream. This is my nightmare.

When I write about the Columbia River passing through Trail BC I’m also writing about the years that altered me from an average, if awkwardly shy, and friendly kid into the adult I am today. An adult I would describe as friendly but not overtly social. In between, strange machines were devised to defend from possible repeats of the constant harassment, bullying and beatings of those that took place in mountains around Trail. Those machines have long since been dismantled but (and here comes a heavy-handed metaphor again) there is still something left in the dirt.

If I am honest and someone asks why I joined the infantry, one aspect of that murky Q&A (an aspect that I’m reluctant to bring to light because I sound like the self-absorbed teenager that I was) is I didn’t ever want to be the victim again. I know now, however, that if you assemble such machines as I did to keep others out you’ll seldom have the joy that comes from allowing others into the vulnerable parts of one’s self.

The Columbia and The Yukon Rivers are important because they stand in for the points in my life when I turned inward. The rivers’ waters deliberate and quiet movement past these towns is a heavy-handed metaphor that could be used by a kid who out of choice and necessity decides that community is too hard to be part of because at his young age he hasn’t had the experience of being separated from it.

Tourist photos

For your consideration, a couple of shots of the sky. Sunset photography is an overdone and over-maligned genre that I would like to contribute to. This photo was taken 20 minutes after midnight. I was washing dishes and looked up to see this. I ran upstairs like a first year photo student and started snapping.
Of course calling it sunset isn't exactly true, more like sun-sidle as that's all it does, creep its way north along the western mountains then creep its way south along the eastern mountains.























Cloud photography on the other hand is always worthwhile. The clouds were seen while looking south from The Dome. Another ride down today, but there's more to come on the ride later.

A learning curve for the socially awkward

Below is a bit of context for the project so far. Written before the 3^rd hangover in 10 days (maybe after the second), before I hopped happily on the wagon, and before I decided – via the explanation below – that this project wouldn’t be about the residents of Dawson, it is a nice glimpse back to where I was in the early days. I'm down to 1 week left and am happy with the project so far. As the Prussian general, Helmuth von Moltke famously said, "No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy."

* * *

When I came here my plan was to consider community. Consider Dawson in relation to those other towns and villages that have carried me to this project, this sentence. But community is about, well, people and I have head-on avoided bringing the people of Dawson into the project. What they might give me, or more precisely, what I might take from them is a question of speculation. From a practical perspective, my conundrum is this: I go to a bar to chat with the more pickled locals but almost exclusively I sit in a corner, making ballpoint sketches of my beer. I am the predictable sketchbook nerd in this regard.

In one of the many ironies at play here, I seldom find moments of epiphany or revelation in the universe of the bar. Production – drawing – is my best option and my best defence.

There are conversations to be had if I will engage them. Instead I continue to hold conversations with the land. But the land offers no conversations. The land tells you something and you respond but that response is rhetorical, unwanted even. I am not telling nature anything it doesn’t already know.

The land doesn't require anything from me. Or what it does require it doesn't negotiate.

It is always telling me about myself because I am always looking at it and it never repeats itself. My head is not down in a book while the thing I seek, the flawed brilliance of the drunk, circulates above my head.

Crossing

The workers' orange baseball caps look from a distance like glowing orbs hovering just above the deck, weaving in and out of the few vehicles they can fit onto each crossing of the George Black ferry,.

***

Front Street passes through town from south to north, tracing the river and terminating at a gravel verge. In the winter an ice bridge does the duty of allowing travelers access to the Top of The World Highway and further on, Chicken, Alaska. But during the summer the George Black ferry acts as a bridge substitute. Watching these shuttle runs from the gravel dike the process is contemplatively mundane: Wait for vehicles, load the vehicles, cross the river, unload the vehicles. Wait for vehicles, load the vehicles, cross the river, unload the vehicles.

Walking along the 9^th Ave. trail and taking the fork up to the landslide north of town, you can pick your way across the scree and boulders, eventually clearing the debris. The second, older trail now works its way further north until interrupted by a smaller slide. From here the river crossing is laid out below to the South West and its story takes on a completely different tone.

Down at the crossing there seems equality to the dialogue between machine and nature. Perspective and scale make the river seem like a thin strip which the ferry slowly makes its way across as a negotiation. The current is strong with eddies swirling clockwise and counter-clockwise, but as it pulls out from the launch the ferry’s propellers kick up such a dervish of brown water as to give the sense of an even match.

Up here, below the peak of The Dome, looking down into the valley, the mass of water eclipses any question of negotiation. The Yukon River is a behemoth and can be nothing other than singular and irrevocable, doubtless and ruthless.

Pulling out from the Eastern shore the ferry briefly runs northwest with the current as it heads into the river’s centre. Having gained room and space it makes a hard left, turning south southwest – any attempt to go cross-current would land it half a kilometer downriver.

As it pivots, the George Black momentarily becomes still. Save for the sound of its engine echoing up the valley wall it seems to be held in a fleeting moment of stasis, a pocket of both water and time. Acknowledging the power and grace of this moment it pauses and then slowly creeps forward, making its way against the currents. It never regains the speed of its initial departure, but instead comes in slowly, carefully aligning itself with the verge on the western shore.

One can only assume the men working this ferry are aware of the river’s gift to them, its permission given. Maybe they are passive in their understanding; Workers doing a job and recognizing this river requires constant vigilance. Perhaps though, with each crossing from east to west and west to east they feel proud, even blessed, to be held firm by such power.

***

It's evening now. The birds continue to sing, as they will all night long, the wasps buzz at the window though will fall silent as the temperature dips. The town is quiet though there is an occasional howl from the drunks down at The Pit. But behind these noises I can hear the drumming of an engine idling in the water, waiting for late night passengers and another chance to turn upstream.

Keeping it social

Paraguay and Italy: 1 all.

I had the Sourdough Saloon (home of The Toe) to myself today... No Euros around except for when Paraguay scored and all of a sudden there appeared a German tourist with a point and shoot to take a photo of the goal on replay. And then he was gone. Another game another crappy Warsteiner which, it turns out, is the only non-alcoholic beer in this town. I might give it a pass tomorrow though I have, however, been considering the Warsteiner shandy option.

There was one other German who sidled up to me and asked, "Is this where Jack London drank whiskey?" I didn't know though I will ask tomorrow when North Korea play Brazil.

Today's production: 1 puppy, 1 backpack, 1 headstone. Tomorrow is a writing day but it also a back to the dump day to try and find a Yukon license plate for The Kid. I have some things to say about the ferry but not tonight.

I went out briefly tonight and walked straight into a conversation about the female equivalent of the bromance. I ordered a Warsteiner and did my part for gender specific lexicons but I should have just turned around.
Bromance, ugh. Let us speak of such things no more.

I just finished a tasty bowl of Corn Flakes and Life and am going to curl up in bed and watch an episode of Lost season 1. I do miss home but its markers, like cereal and Lost, as well as this blog, give me some sense of connection, false though they might be.

2 Wrongs Make a Right

No meat and no alcohol. What kind of Yukon residency am I having? A good friend of mine once spent a year in Japan doing the time honoured ESL gig. She was a strict vegetarian and so spent a year having to work her way around fish. Years later she said that was a mistake and, at least in that case, moral inflexibility (of the kind I am practicing here) was a mistake. The Japanese do some pretty tasty stuff with fish just as I know Elk sausage is something special.

I have a new routine though. It started yesterday morning and I'm already calling it a routine. I Head over to The Downtown Hotel, order a very suspect 0% German beer (Warsteiner I believe) and watch The World Cup with the European tourists. I nurse my beer, work up a ballpoint-pen sketch of the bottle and watch the match. It's pretty alright and though we don't know each other, like the sports propagandists will tell you, football unites the world, or at least the out of town version of the world.

The locals don't seem to care all that much (or maybe they're taking advantage of the miracle of home TV) but as you'd imagine, the old worlders do. As mentioned previously some of 'em went so far as to take photos of the high Def TV mounted high on the wall each time Germany scored... which was often.

My day, as always, begins with breakfast cereal and for the next 11 days (until I leave) I think it'll begin with fake beer and overly enthusiastic Euros. That's the kind of Yukon residency I'm having.

The day's production.

I started the day with some Germans, watching their country trounce the Aussies. I had a somewhat gross 0.0% beer, but it seemed more appropriate than tonic water.

After that I put my head down and painted. This isn't done most likely but I think it's 95% complete. Putting it here makes me feel more productive.

I give you: Judd Wood

Dump Day

Today I rode out to the Dump. As a kid in the Kootenays, family dump trips were always an exciting adventure. Once we found a working colour TV and would occasionally see a black bear. Those memories were what compelled me to head out there today. All in all I'm glad I did. No bears and I brought nothing home except for 2 strands of yarn for Shannon. Dump yarn!

It was a tough call to go out today as England were playing the U.S. It's all okay as I'm watching the match as I type. Thanks CBC for on demand web World Cup

Grinding up, floating down

The intermittent rains of the last few days have left a richness in the air that makes running an intoxicating pleasure. Mary Mcleod Rd. is a steep grade that starts near the back of the residency house and works its way up the side of Dome Mountain cresting at the rambling cemetery grounds. Those first 5 minutes are a grind but suffering up the rutted road trumps any happy hour G&T binge down in the town.

A coyote does its own run along the treeline north of the newest burial plots as the grade slackens and Mary McLeod Meets Dome rd. signaling the start of the downhill reward that will eventually loop back along the riverbank and into town.

As I write this I feel a slight giddiness about these runs. Running on and off for 20 years now, those at the age of nineteen were far and away the toughest of my life. In that liminal year between civilian and soldier, teen and juvenile-adulthood almost all the running was hard, fast and without respite. Just completing a run was often challenge enough. Battle School was no place for the faint of will and the ability to disconnect body from mind was a crucial survival skill.

Like all infantry schools, the physical space of CFB Wainwright has a hard anchoring locus, often built around the imposing indifference of a parade square. From this block of flat blackness platoons head out into the training area, paved roads giving way to oiled hardpack and then dirt roads rippling across the broken grasslands – puffs of dust circling low on the ground as they pass by. The occasional truck or APC passes the platoons and the candidates do their best to not mentally project themselves into the easy living of the passenger seat or crew compartment.

Spittle gather on the edges of their gaping mouths as they suck in as much dust-filled air as possible, focusing their blurring vision on the feet in front of them.

But these long ago sufferfests are just a context. It is the unknown periphery of CFB Wainwright that I am thinking about as I turn past the jutting cliff face to my right and onto the hardpack of Dawson. The small, functional homes I’m passing have qualities kindred to the PMQs of bases across Canada. Those post-war family dwelling are clustered dots on the base’s edge and feel like a mirage when your days are spent humping gear and weapons, living in a crucible of adrenaline and ache.

On our rare day off we might venture a run through these unknown zones feeling like the outsiders we surely were. Children run around in the small fenced yards while lines of laundry are dried by winds heading east across Central Alberta’s expansive grasslands, the nearby Saskatchewan border their next marker. Like most prairie living, domestic life perseveres and almost flourishes in spite of and because of the harshness all around.

Again an outsider, I run along Dawson’s 5^th Ave. wondering, where is the parade square, where are the chin-up bars and the quartermaster stores, where is the hard, defining heart of Dawson? This far north there must be a hardness and the characters wandering the streets affirm my belief. Hardness here is in the hills and rivers around town, in the camps and mines that I’ll likely never see but it is also held in the knuckles and fingertips of the guys downing draft at 10am or happy hour (5-7pm) on their day off, perhaps their last day off for some time to come.

**

One foot in front of the other. Each running step gives the briefest moment where the body floats above the ground. One shoe hits the ground, both shoe and ground compress and the tiniest portion of heel tread is left behind, embedded in the oiled dirt of this town that continues to offer small and suspect glimpses into the past.

Before the fall (or jump up)

The boozin' is over. Soon I'll do some sketches of Tonic water bottles (the new beer) but for now an encapsulation of my first ten days. Most of my writing was done while nursing an afternoon bottle or pint so it had its merits.

Just so we are clear

I miss you S. Gerard.

Some a the works

Here are some of the painted work that I've been doing up here. Hopefully the desperate humour of the paintings works with the desperate contemplation of the writing. Who knows? Not me, not yet.

I give you: Hobo Hotel, Tree Cave and The Mattress Trailer

Swallows from the past (or maybe the future)

The edge of the prairie around Wainwright has little in common with the mixed foliage of this Yukon valley. Similarities can be found in the air carrying the scent of an anonymous low, budded plant which is permanently affixed to my memories of Wainwright. The air similarly carries clusters of swallows who I yesterday watched diving into the river low and fast, pulling out of the upstream as soon as they were subsumed by it.

Today I am back by the river seeking them out. I find myself needing reason in a world which has temporarily and suddenly lost almost all such commodity. The Yukon flows as inevitably as ever and today the blue skies are returning. A swallow turns sharply and flies directly at my head followed by another, hot on its tail before they fly off, continuing their dogfight. These actions are likely a warning but I greet them with a grin, travelers acknowledging each other as they pass on a country road.

Years back in Wainwright, with the same smell in the air, I sat on the hull of an Armoured Personnel Carrier eating jam on stale crackers watching the long grass bend in agreement with the wind. The swallows were out flying low and fast, again upstream in the river of prairie grass. I followed one with my eyes, straining to pick it out as its form shrank into the distance and thought to myself, “I remember this feeling, remember being a swallow.” That twenty-year-old version of myself, almost impossible to see in me now, was often filled with rage, booze and frustration. On that day though I was imbued with a joy borne of absolute certainty.

Myself at twenty is now twenty years behind me and as I settle into this new decade I vainly hope the swallows of Dawson, like their Wainwright cousins, might offer a righted view of the world, a world which seems to have slipped of its axis.

--

Tonight the drunks of these two towns will stumble into the streets, mimicking a slow motion version of the seeming randomness of the swallow. Their worlds will take on the tilted, comforting haze of the immediate.

Don't read too much into this post

Below the levee with the town out of view, I am down at the river. Such a massive and endless thing making so little noise. It glides by me as a trick, an impossibility. This morning the clouds hung so very low over the valley, submerging the tops of the mountains and appearing as the river’s nemesis or twin.

Yesterday, in my temporary cabin, away from my temporary residency, away from my home, I watched and listened to more TV than I’ve done all year and the subject of death was everywhere for me.

House, True Blood, Lost, something about Haitian Voodoo and Angel (on DVD) were my line-up. This morning Patrick Lane told me about the Red Squirrel in his yard. Three years of arguing between the two and Lane now holds this squirrel, victim of a car’s wheel, in his hand as it fades out.

My own fear of death has something to do with the loss of control, the same way turbulence terrifies me because I have no say in the equation. Surrendering control is not easy for me but the river has such certainty, is so sure of itself that it doesn’t need to say a word. The swallows dive in briefly, flying upstream, gulping in water, bugs, I know not what. They are fearless flyers.

I don’t believe the river but it assures me that one day I’ll come to terms with what it has to offer.

What's that noise?

This morning I was awoken by an intermittent fading and lamenting electronic whine. At first I assumed it was Kerri’s (the other residency artist) alarm clock as it was coming from a distance and was intermittent. The noise of what could be described as a wounded cyborg wasn’t abating though, so I finally got up to check it out.

As it turns out the noise was the smoke alarm being activated by a burst water pipe in the ceiling, drowning the alarm and flooding the residency house. The good news is neither our work nor possessions was overly affected though there’s damage to the walls, floors and ceilings of the living room, kitchen and Kerri’s studio.

The scenario of waking up to a wounded cyborg and a subsequently raining ceiling is a little confounding at 6am on a Sunday morning but when all was said and done, the outcome could have been much worse.

We’re now out of the building and have been put up at individual cabins at The Triple J Hotel. The cabins are pretty cute with tiny kitchenettes and I have a table with a window at which to paint. The only down side is the lack of internet access, which I can only gain by sitting in the lobby of the hotel.

As I look out the window of my temporary new home I am slightly reminded of a WW2 era army training camp or high-end fruit pickers shacks in Kelowna. For example:

Work continues though as can be almost viewed by my sketch of Shannon in the above photo.

Now though, I’m heading back to the studio to collect my ziplock bag of Earl Grey tea. I have already brought the milk and cereal with me. Stability has almost been achieved.

C'mon, crumble

It's worth emphasizing that these posts are works in progress, writing that I hope will one day constitute part of a book. But here and now they are attempts for me to understand where, and how, I am.
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While I’m in Dawson my partner Shannon is back at home drawing, crocheting, re-watching Lost, spending time with her friends. She is home.

The other night we were talking across these few time zones about the blog so far and what I am calling The Island of Toronto (not to be confused with The Toronto Islands). For myself this island starts as just that, the accumulated physical elements of the land, but land whose make-up has little connection to my previous homes. The smells, the terrain of Toronto – with occasional exceptions – are foreign… but then again the present is always foreign. When my family moved to Trail in 1979 both the land and the people were unrelentingly foreign but now that polluted town on The Columbia is part of my known terrain.

For Shannon though, this island of mine is emotional; a construction built from my lived past, starting with the pain and raw beauty of being a kid in The West Kootenays. It was only when I realized I had turned Toronto into an island that I began to address the many decisions, large and small, that over the years have moved me away from community.

I am here in Dawson, a town of around 2000 souls, in equal parts considering and ignoring the specifics of small town socialization that compelled me to come here in the first place.

I come here from Toronto, a city I love and am happy to be away from. My island of Toronto temporarily resides in the Yukon River. If I look out my window, past these ramshackle houses and down to the riverbank, I can see it looming and slowly, hopefully eroding from the sheer force of the water passing around it.